The Most Graphically Demanding PC Games

Update: A new graphically-demanding game is crowned. See which one it is!

At Maximum PC we love pushing our PCs to their limits by testing high-end games at maximum settings. To reach these limits, you'll need to fire up the most über-demanding games. What are the most graphically-demanding games you ask? We’ve thrown together a list of the gnarliest PC games that will give your precious gaming rig a kick-ass workout.

Testing Methodology:

We tested each game at maximum settings on a 1920x1080 display. Our modest mid-range test rig consisted of an i7-2700K CPU overclocked to 4.5GHz, a GTX 680 video card overclocked to 1140MHz, and 8GB of G.Skill DDR3 RAM. We first started out disabling motion blur, which is a frame rate crutch, and cranked up all of the other settings as high as they would go. Another setting that was crucial to disable was V-Sync, so that our frame rate was not capped with our 60Hz refresh rate. We played each game for 15 minutes, and recorded its average frame rate using FRAPS. Each frame rate listed below is that of our playthrough and may not be exactly repeatable because the frame rate averages were captured with real-world dynamic testing, which may vary from playthrough to playthrough, even on a rig with the exact same hardware. Still, our tests should provide an accurate measure of relative performance between titles. The rankings are listed from least taxing to most based on average frame rate count.

Call of Duty Ghosts: #11

Game Engine: IW Engine

The latest installment of Call of Duty isn’t too taxing to run as we experienced an average frame rate of 67.9 FPS. In our gameplay session we floated through space and ran around inside a few burning buildings during the game’s first mission. COD games aren’t very challenging to run because they still use the same game engine as COD 4, which came out over 6 years ago. To put it into perspective, the old engine is easy enough for last gen consoles to run at 60 FPS. Maybe the next installment in the series will finally change the game's outdated game engine so it can rival the graphical capabilities of other modern military shooters.

Crysis: #10

Game Engine: CryEngine 2

When Crytek made Crysis they wanted to make a “future proof” game and we can say that six years later, they have successfully done so by garnering the 10th spot on this list as we only garnered an average frame rate of 58.2 FPS. What’s to blame for the relatively low frame rate for such an old game? Particle effects are hot and heavy in Crysis and they caused our frame rate to dip while testing, throw in some extreme physics (not to be confused with PhysX), and some realistic water effects, and you get a six-year old game that’s even hard to run even on an overclocked GTX 680.

Hitman Absolution: #9

Game Engine: Glacier 2

We tested Hitman Absolution by sleuthing around the first level killing foes covertly snapping necks with our bare hands. We then got into a firefight with few of the security guards and killed several dozen more enemies before finishing our benchmark run. The end result was a frame rate that was 53.8 FPS and made Hitman our number nine game overall. Hitman is quite CPU heavy, so our relatively low frame rate could have been due to getting bottlenecked by our 2700K CPU not being able to muster physics calculations fast enough to keep up with our overclocked GTX 680 GPU.

GTA IV: #8

Game Engine: Rockstar Advanced Game Engine (RAGE)

Yes, we’re upset as anybody for the lack of a PC version of GTA V, but even the fourth game in the series (released in 2008) made our mid-range machine struggle. We only saw an average frame rate of 53.21 FPS, while driving around crazily through Liberty City, where we would eventually end up picking fights with random pedestrians. It’s hard to believe that this game came out almost five years ago! GTA IV, however, doesn’t look very impressive by today’s gaming standards and we blame the game’s demanding hardware performance on poor PC optimization. The engine behind the game's demanding performance uses an amalgamation of three different engines, including Rockstar's RAGE engine, Euphoria engine, and Bullet Physics Library. Hitman Absolution, by comparison, looks much better than GTA IV and has almost the same frame rate.

Click the next page for the top five most graphically demanding PC games!

Comments

I run triple 22-inchers on a six year old rig built around an ancient Barton 3.0 with 4G RAM, Vista and a single Radeon 6850. I run at 5282 x 1080 and I'm satisfied with all the games I play at that rez on medium settings: World of Tanks, War Thunder, Star Trek Online, Neverwinter, SWTOR, etc. Is it perfect photo-quality graphics and 60+ fps? Of course not. But you don't NEED that to enjoy a game, which was Valor's point.

To be fair, it does get CPU-bottled in some games: Wargame AirLand Battle in 20-player mode, for example, will bring the poor old boy to his knees. So I don't play it in 20-player mode.

As to the article, it should be pointed out that the Cry Engines (all iterations) are infamous for being very poorly optimized. No amount of horsepower can speedily pull 50,000 metric tons of useless crap, which is exactly what the Cry Engines are. If you want to see how to optimize an engine properly, look at War Thunder. Gorgeous and runs glass smooth at triple-monitor rez with TrackIR on the above rig.

Having said all that, I am upgrading soon. =P Finally talked the wife into releasing some of that tax return for a new build. Even then I won't build top tier, however. One or two gens back is fine for me. Early adoption of bleeding-edge computer hardware is a hobby for the rich and neurotic.

Sounds as though you should jump to a current-gen AMD GPU so that you can jump on the Mantle bandwagon, since you've already experienced CPU-bind and Mantle is supposed to save us from that.

...My 6870/6850 crossfire can't really handle 2560*1440 as well as I'd like, and 1440 is too low a resolution still. My 23" 1080p is unbearable, it is like looking through a screen door. Also, I still play some old games where the greater the res, the more I see of the field (as opposed to the more detailed the field).

It reveals the sorry state of PC ports when quite a few of these games were designed to run on the inferior consoles-and still look it on PC-and yet can be considered "demanding" on PC as the games rely on the power of hardware to cover their developers' lazy coding.

It sounds as though some of these games might be made less demanding if they were Mantle enabled as Mantle promises to allow the CPU to better handle high-physics effects like exploding barrels, no?

Never thought I see a game that would make the men and women at Maximum Pc hard pressed. I mean I am still shocked too see how much it takes to run Metrow 2033 at max settings but just wow. Nivida has some very talented people working for them. And I thought Crysis 3 was a difficult game to run on a PC at high settings and still get decent FPS Metro Last Light.... just wow. But then again different comptures and configurations like "Jimmthang" said "BTW impressive list Max PC"

If your going to count Ubersampling and other names for SSAA as reasons Witcher 2 and Tomb Raider get such low performance, then you need to turn it on for Battlefield 4 as well. They just call it resolution scale and gave it a slider with a default at 100%, but it does the same thing that any other name for SSAA does. Not really accurate to turn it on for some games but leave it off for others.

Personally, I'd rather just leave it off for all the games to even the playing field a bit. It's such a drastic performance hit for something that is done so much more efficiently by other methods, I suspect very few people actually use it.

But that's my point. Setting resolution scale to 100% is effectively "SSAA off". Increasing the resolution scale to 200% or more effectively renders the image at a higher resolution, then downsamples back to your native resolution. This is exactly what SSAA does, Resolution scale at 200% should be the same as SSAA x4 (as it's rendering 4x as many pixels as standard).

The point I was originally trying to make was that, if you are going to turn on Ubersampling for Witcher and SSAA for Tomb Raider, then you should set Resolution Scale to 200% for BF4.

Again, though, my personal preference is just to leave it off for all three games.

I'm not sure about the other, but I know Battlefield 4 offers independent controls for SSAA (called Resolution Scale in the game), Deferred AA like MSAA, and Post Process AA like FXAA. The SSAA options makes nice screenshots, but I doubt many people actually play with it as it absolutely crushes performance (and like I pointed out in another comment, was left turned off for this list).

Crysis 3.
I use an old modded HP Pavilion OEM, AMD Phenom II x4 830 2.80 GHz, Nvidia 560ti o/c, 8 Gigs of RAM, 10K rpm HD. I run the game with all settings maxed out on "Very High". Motion Blur is set next to lowest, and run it with MSAA at Medium (4X). There are options in settings for SSAA and FXAA. I never use them because MSAA offers the best eye candy on my pretty HP 1080 GLOSSY screen, (yes, I did say glossy for all you glossy haters). Frame rates are smooth, no jitter, tearing or noticeable lag.

...actually, trog69 is correct. He/she will need to upgrade not to just a GTX780, but at least two of them and running SLI. I play all my games at 2560x1440 resolutions and have a 3930K OC'd to 4.2Ghz and have two Gigabyte GTX780 Ghz Edition cards in SLI. With all graphic settings maxed in game and dynamic vertical sync enabled, I can tell you now that both Crysis 3 and Metro Last Light (PhysX is disabled though) frame rates still drop below 30FPS in certain parts of the game. In Metro Last Light, I have only been able to play it with the PhysX enabled when running three GTX780s (only after several Nvidia driver updates may I add). I am no longer running three of them as their was just one game that needed a third card and that was Metro Last Light. The heat and power consumption of the third GTX780 wasn't worth it, so I removed it and put it into my second gaming system which is now also running two GTX780s in SLI. Metro Last Light is easily playable with PhysX enabled at 1920 x 1080 with two GTX780s, as is every other game listed here. Remember that 2560x1440 has 76% more pixels to process vs. 1920x1080 ;-)

I played Crysis 3 on 1440P with 2x 670 not that long ago and never dropped below 60FPS unless there was an over kill of explosions. I wasn't use AA though because at 1440P AA becomes a lot less noticeable.

For most gaming his 680 will be fine for 1440P till the Nvidia 800 series releases unless he wants to really have the absolute max possible graphics.

I would argue that Crysis 1 is still presenting with low frame rates - just like GTA IV - because of relatively poor implementation, not because of all the eye candy. There are better looking games that run at a much higher frame rate, so the answer is simply that it was fairly poorly put together.

I really hope the PC version of GTA V is done better than GTA IV - I am holding onto my money until I see that it is.

Technically, what you are speaking of is poor software coding that fails to optimize the game execution using specific PC hardware, software (operating system), and graphics API (DirectX, graphics drivers). Console ported games are at the top of the guilty list. A majority of the time, game designers are just lazy (or just sloppy) and release the PC version of the game as fast as possible in as little time as possible. Crysis is the exception. The Crysis game engine was designed from the beginning to NOT be optimized. That is, Cry Engine was written to take advantage of computer hardware processing and does not fully take advantage of any particular hardware architecture (i.e., Nvidia vs AMD). Thus, it is still to this day very demanding to play at higher graphics settings on the most current generation graphics cards. Step up the resolution and playable frame rates disappear. This is where SLI and Crossfire have to fill the gap if you really want to play the game at higher resolutions above 1920 x 1080. And don't even think 4K gaming with all graphics settings maxed out will be feasable without having to run at least to top end graphics cards in SLI. For now, two or more GTX780Ti cards -OR- two or more R9 290X cards will be your only current 4K gaming solution. Now, make note before jumping off into making comments. I said ALL graphics settings maxed. That includes shadows, motion blur, and in-game physics engines :D

It won't be. Rockstar doesn't give a shit about the PC. Going back to GTA 3, they've all ran like ass or had crippling 30 fps caps. Yes, you could turn vsync off, but then half the scripting wouldn't work and the games would lock up at random.

We mentioned that GTA V is poorly optimized, but optimization happens on a granular level anyhow and graphical beauty can be subjective. We primarily wanted to get down to brass task and see which games made our hardware struggle the most for this story.

@jimmythang: you did mention it, and I thank you for it. Not trying to give you all a hard time, just pointing out that Crysis was in the same boat. A lot of people think Crysis is such a beast because it is so pretty (and it is a gorgeous game), when spending a bit more time fleshing out their engine could have mitigated a lot of the workload problems.

I agree, and a high end nvidia one as well. seems like I got double the tomb raider fps with a 2500k and a 6950HD, then went to nvidia and my frames plummeted (only on that game and only with tresfx on though)